TITLE:
The Effects of Future Climate Change on Energy Consumption in Residential Buildings in China
AUTHORS:
D. H. C. Chow, M. Kelly, J. Darkwa
KEYWORDS:
Climate Change; Energy Consumption; Residential Buildings; Retrofitting; Urbanisation
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Power and Energy Engineering,
Vol.1 No.5,
November
26,
2013
ABSTRACT: China is currently going through a phase of rapid mass
urbanisation, and it is important to investigate how the growing built
environment will cope with climate change, to see how the energy consumption of
buildings in China
will be affected. This is especially important for the fast-growing cities in
the north, and around the east and south coasts. This paper aims to study the
effects of future climate change on the energy consumption of buildings in the
three main climate regions of China, namely the “Cold” region in the north,
which includes Beijing; the “Hot Summer Cold Winter” region in the east, which
includes cities such as Shanghai and Ningbo; and the “Hot Summer Mild Winter”
region in the south, which includes Guangzhou.
Using data from the climate model, HadCM3, Test Reference Years are generated
for the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s, for various IPCC future scenarios. These are
then used to access the energy performance of typical existing buildings, and
also the effects of retrofitting them to the standard of the current building
codes. It was found that although there are reductions in energy consumption
for heating and cooling with retrofitting existing residential buildings to the
current standard, the actual effects are very small compared with the extra energy
consumption that comes as a result of future climate change. This is especially
true for Guangzhou,
which currently have very little heating load, so there is little benefit of
the reduction in heating demand from climate change. The effects of retrofitting
in Beijing are also limited, and only in Ningbo was the effect of
retrofitting able to nullify the effects of climate change up to 2020s. More
improvements in building standards in all three regions are required to
significantly reduce the effects of future climate change, especially to beyond
2020s.